When we meet Emily (Aubrey Plaza), she seems like a fairly typical struggling millennial. Up to her eyebrows in college debt, but unable to find the kinds of employment that her degree was supposed to secure, due to a prior felony conviction which employers run a mile from, she’s stuck working for a food delivery company to service spiralling college debt interest.
Written and directed by John Patton Ford, the film does a good job of setting up Emily’s circumstances. They are pretty dire, but also plausible. To top it all off, her college mates are thriving, and don’t appear to really understand that she simply doesn’t have as much money as them. When a fast food co-worker offers to connect her with a company offering $200 to “dummy shoppers”, you totally buy that she would go along with it, even when the scheme is revealed to be a credit card fraud operation. It’s not a spoiler — look at the title of the film — to reveal that the scams are only going to get bigger and bolder.
As neatly set-up as the world of the film is, it wouldn’t work half as well without Aubrey Plaza’s brilliantly specific lead performance, portraying Emily as an emotionally shut-down woman on the edge. There’s no hysteria, but plenty of desperation. Plaza is the kind of performer who has been lauded for her ability to play low-key snarky weirdos, from early roles like Parks And Recreation's April onwards, and it would have been so easy for her to parlay that persona into roles demanding zero evolution, simply snarking her way to the top of ever bigger films with ever bigger budgets.
But while she’s not averse to a payday gig (Dirty Grandpa, anyone?), she has also consistently sought out weirder work, where she gets to do more than just deadpan. To a list including the brilliant Ingrid Goes West and Black Bear, you can now add Emily The Criminal, which might just be her best showcase yet.